It's not uncommon for anime to take a lot of notes from Hollywood movies, and vice versa. One way anime shows appreciation to the movies that influenced it is to give it a fun shout-out, whether through a mention or parody.
Sometimes these references are easy-to-miss details that are hidden in plain sight, while other times, they're used an entire episode's plot. There are countless such tributes, and there will be more to come.
10 Pop Team Epic — The DVDs Recreated The 'Die Hard' Trilogy's Posters
Pop Team Epic is filled to the brim with Hollywood references and parodies, but one of its most elaborate homages isn't even in the anime itself. Instead, they can be found on the sketch anime's video releases, where each DVD's cover art parodied the posters of Die Hard, Die Hard 2, and Die Hard With A Vengeance.
The anime was compiled in three volumes, and Pipimi replaced John McClane in each volume's recreation of a Die Hard movie's poster. In Pop Team Epic's typical meta sense of humor, the regular DVD copies were drawn in the show's usual style while the Blu-Ray copies got a more detailed and lifelike Pipimi.
9 Wave, Listen To Me! — Minare Koda Mistook 'Ghost Ship' For 'Ghost'
Shortly after a devastating breakup, the aimless Minare coped by watching a movie. According to her friend, the best coping movie had Demi Moore starring in it and it was guaranteed to make people cry. Minrare, however, forgot the title and just got the DVD with the closest title to her friend's suggestion: Ghost Ship.
To be clear, her DVD clearly had Death Ship printed on it, but the cover art and Demi Moore's name drop made the allusions to Ghost Ship and Ghost obvious. Regardless, Minare was so emotionally vulnerable that she cried over what she mistook for the 1990 supernatural romance before asking her friend why the gory movie had no Demi Moore.
8 Carnival Phantasm — Shinji Mataou & Rider Reenacted The Most Famous Shot From 'E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial'
Carnival Phantasm is a parody of the entire Nasuverse, but that doesn't mean it's above lampooning literally everything else. In Episode 9, "Holy Grail Grand Prix," the Masters and Servants participate in a race for the Holy Grail. Each pair's vehicles are chosen at random, and Shinji and Rider got a granny bike.
Rider reassured Shinji that her biking skills are rated an A+, and she proved just that - albeit with too much gusto. Rider drove the granny bike (with Shinji in the basket) so fast that they rocketed to the sky, where their moonlit silhouette remade the most iconic shot from Steven Spielberg's classic movie about a boy and his Reese's Pieces-loving alien friend.
7 Hellsing Ultimate — Alucard & Seras' Guns Are Named After Bruce Willis' Movies & 'Dune' (1984)
One of the weirder revelations in Hellsing Ultimate is that Alucard and Seras' firearms are sentient. Specifically, their guns harbor souls in the same way that Bleach's Zanpakuto do. Sera's anti-tank cannon Harkonnen is named after Baron Harkonnen from Dune (1984) so, naturally, its spirit looks like the hedonistic baron.
Alucard's pistol Jackal, meanwhile, is named after The Jackal, and its spirit took the shape not of the titular assassin but its star Bruce Willis. When Alucard nearly got trapped in The Willis Zone, Jackal tempted him with escapism by taking on different forms all based on Willis' hit movies like Armageddon, The Fifth Element, and Pulp Fiction.
6 Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt — Tom Croose From 'Magnolia' Put Panty & Stocking On A Public Trial
Panty & Stocking With Garterbelt has more in common with American adult cartoons and humor than Japanese pop culture, leading to an abundance of Hollywood references. Episode 8 has one of the anime's most elaborate bits, focusing heavily on a parody of Tom Cruise's character Frank T.J. Mackey from Magnolia.
After killing tons of people in the previous episodes, celebrity lawyer Tom Croose is brought into the gameshow "Judgment Day" to win the case against Panty and Stocking. Tom Croose is just as loudmouthed and egoistic as Frank was, and the English dub went as far as directly quoting Frank's most famous line about what body parts to respect and tame.
5 Cowboy Bebop — 'Mushroom Samba' Had Cameos From Coffy & John Shaft
As a whole, Cowboy Bebop could be read as a 26-episode homage to cinema itself, but one of its more specific homages came in Episode 17, "Mushroom Samba." Ed and Ein's team-up is a combination of tributes to Spaghetti Westerns and Blaxploitation movies, but the latter has the most obvious movie references.
Two of the bounty hunters on the trail of drug smuggler Domino Walker are Coffee and Shaft, who are clearly based on the Blaxploitation icons Coffy and John Shaft. The latter took the references a step further by dragging a coffin wherever he went, which is what the Spaghetti Western legend Django did in his titular movies.
4 Gintama — Hasegawa Taizou Starred In A Parody Of 'Slumdog Millionaire'
As the number one parody anime, spoofing movies is unsurprisingly one of Gintama's favorite plotlines. One of the anime's longest parodies was the whole of Episode 248, "Madaodog Madaonaire," which remade Slumdog Millionaire but replaced the young and aspiring Jamal Malik with the aimless slacker Hasegawa.
Like Slumdog Millionaire, "Madaodog Madaonaire" cuts between Hasegawa's past and his current predicament in the game show. The main difference is that, instead of showing how he overcame adversities and hardships, Hasegawa's flashbacks show how hilariously unlucky and pathetic he is while revealing why he's so desperate to win the prize money.
3 Ososmatsu-San — Iyami & Matsuzo Matsuno Starred In A Parody Of 'They Live'
Like Gintama before it, spoofs are Ososmatsu-San's bread and butter. That said, it usually lampooned broad genres or Japanese pop culture. One of its more elaborate Hollywood parodies can be found in Episode 16 (Season 3), where Iyami and the Matsuno's patriarch found themselves in a They Live scenario - complete with a back-alley brawl.
Like in John Carpenter's famous movie, Iyami found a pair of shades that let him see through an alien race's conditioning. One of the truths he sees is that the Matsuno sextuplets and others have been replaced by alien clones. Iyami and Matsuzo stop the Nanmaiders' plot, only for Iyami to take control of their machinery to rewrite the world in his image.
2 Asobi Asobase — The Pastimers Club Remade 'Star Trek' Without A Budget
For the Cultural Festival, the Pastimers Club made a sci-fi movie. Problem is, not only did Kasumi's movie not have a budget but the only reason she wanted a sci-fi epic was because she saw Star Trek. Worse, her only takeaways were that standing emotionlessly with a bowl cut was all an actor needed to do to be an alien and that there should be a sexy spy.
The actual short is never shown, but from what few scenes were shown being filmed, it was clear that Kasumi's movie had more in common with her erotic fan fiction than the final frontier. Hanako topped it all off when she showed off the movie's poster, which was just a recreation of the original Star Wars poster.
1 Daicon III & IV — The Daicon Bunny Girl Fought Every Movie Character, Monster & Ship That The Animators Could Remember
In 1981 and 1983, the Daicon III and IV Nihon SF Taikai conventions were held. Each event kicked off with its own anime openings, both of which featured the Daicon Bunny Girl meeting or fighting every pop culture icon known. These included: DC and Marvel superheroes, Darth Vader, the Starship Enterprise, the Xenomorph, and countless more.
Because of the sheer number of unlicensed Hollywood and anime cameos, the Daicon openings' legal status has been in flux ever since their debuts, making it nigh impossible to watch or even find them anywhere. In fact, it was only this year that the shorts' creators at Daicon Film reunited to work on their shorts' official restorations.